Last week’s emergency visits to Israel to try to rescue the faltering peace talks, and a flurry of different proposals which have been shot down by either Israel, Palestine, or both have the Obama Administration increasingly souring on the process, and suggesting their involvement may be coming to an end.
Secretary of State John Kerry declared that there are “limits to the amount of time and effort” the US was willing to expend on the talks when “the parties themselves are unwilling to take constructive steps.”
Kerry went on to say that it was time for both Israel and the Palestinians to have a “reality check” on their interest in the talks, and that the US “are not going to sit there indefinitely” waiting for them to start taking the process seriously.
The realization that the talks are going nowhere seems to have reached both Israel and the Palestinians long before the Obama Administration, and the talks have been dead for all intents and purposes for at least a week now. The reluctance of either side to formally exit the talks is more a function of trying to shift blame to the other side.
